Confined To A Thai Fishing Boat, For Three Years

Vannak Prum of Cambodia was sold onto a Thai fishing boat where he was forced to work in miserable conditions for three years before escaping. Thailand's huge fishing industry is coming under increasing criticism for using trafficked workers who have been sold to unscrupulous ship captains.

Prum drew this picture of the Thai boat on which he was held and forced to work as a fisherman.

Becky Palmstrom and Shannon Service for NPR

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Originally published on June 27, 2012 9:46 am

Thailand supplies a large portion of America's seafood. But Thailand's giant fishing fleet is chronically short of up to 60,000 fishermen per year, leaving captains scrambling to find crew. Human traffickers have stepped in, selling captives from Cambodia and Myanmar to the captains for a few hundred dollars each. Once at sea, the men often go months, or even years, without setting foot on land.

First of two parts

Cambodian Vannak Prum's destiny changed in a dirt-road town called Malai. It's a Cambodian outpost on the border with Thailand that is known for its involvement in the trafficking of human beings.

Prum arrived in Malai seven years ago searching for work. His wife was pregnant, and he needed money for the hospital bill. He intended to work for two months, but ended up meeting a human trafficker.

A few days later, Prum was sold onto a Thai fishing boat the length of a basketball court, where he worked in tight conditions with 10 men. He says he didn't reach land again for three years.

"I didn't get paid," he says. "I remained in the middle of the sea and worked day and night."

As Thailand grows more prosperous, its citizens are shunning fishing work in which, even in the best cases, men are away for months chasing dwindling fish stocks.

Injuries and fatalities are common, and seasickness — at least in the beginning — is constant. Wicharn Sirichai-Ekawat owns a small fleet of fishing boats and consults with the National Fisheries Association of Thailand.

"There are about 150,000 men working on the boats, and about 40 percent of them are using foreign labor," he says. "We depend on them."

Some of these men are recruited legally, but others, like Prum, are sold into bondage. They report 20-hour days under mind-numbing conditions: minimal fresh food or water, no medicine apart from aspirin, cramped bunks, unsafe conditions and the relentless smell of fish.

"Sometimes the winch cable would accidentally cut off," Prum says. "If any of us stayed in front of it, the cable would injure or even kill us."

Ship bosses pose their own hazards. "One man's head was cut off and thrown in the water," Prum says. "I saw it."

Reports Of Abuse, Killings

The United Nations Inter-Agency Project on Human Trafficking interviewed fishermen on Thai boats who are from Myanmar, also known as Burma; 59 percent said they witnessed a murder by their captain.

The fishermen also said that captains often give workers drugs — mainly amphetamines — so they will keep working through the night.

The fishing boats are able to stay at sea for extended periods thanks to a network of shuttle boats, or motherships, that come and pick up the fish that's been caught and deliver fuel, food, ice and other supplies that fishing boats need to keep going.

Ultimately, Thai fish products show up on American shelves in a variety of ways, from fish sticks to pet food.

The Thai boats catch an estimated 1 in 5 pounds of American mackerel and sardines, and a good portion of anchovies on American pizzas. Thailand's two biggest seafood exports — farmed shrimp and tuna — are not implicated in these particular abuses, but have labor and environmental concerns of their own.

Now 33, Prum looks out the window in Malai, perplexed by the changes that have transformed the place over the past seven years.

"When I was here last, there was a roundabout," he says. "Now I'm lost, because they removed the traffic circle."

It's midnight, and Prum cruises slowly through the dark. He is looking for his trafficker.

A Network Of Traffickers

The man who sold Vannak Prum into these conditions is part of a loose network of human traffickers that stretches from the bustling ports of Thailand, deep into remote villages in neighboring Cambodia and Myanmar.

Malai's district chief, Tep Khunnal, says traffickers move people through the area's illegal border crossings with the help of the Cambodian military and police.

"I don't know if the Thai side takes money," he says, "but I know they take it on the Cambodian side." Khunnal says he wants to address the problem, but too many people profit from human smuggling.

In Prum's case, he met a taxi driver who convinced him to search for better paying work in Thailand. When the driver brought him to Malai, Prum was introduced to a man who was a trafficker, but Prum got cold feet and tried to back out.

The driver, however, presented Prum with a $12 tab for the trip, which Prum couldn't pay. The trafficker then stepped in and paid the fare, and that effectively sealed Prum's fate.

The trafficker then sold Prum to another set of smugglers in Thailand. The driver turned a profit, the trafficker turned a profit, the local money changer turned a profit — and Prum was locked up in a Thai port.

Prum pressed his face against a crack in the building.

"I saw the sea and boats," he says. "That's when I realized I was trafficked."

Officials Get A Cut

Phil Robertson of Human Rights Watch says Thai police also profit off of men like Prum.

"Most of the time when migrants are arrested, the police aren't planning to make a case or hand them over to immigration, as they're required to do," he says. "What they're doing is holding them and then trying to extort money out of them."

Thai police aren't alone.

"Every part of the Thai officers will benefit from this — the province, police, labor officers," says former Marine Police Commander Surapol Thuanthong. "They all get bribes from illegal migrants and related businesses."

Thuanthong says Thailand's Marine Police have tried to convince the Thai government to make the workers legal so they can be tracked and protected — but the sheer number of undocumented workers makes it impossible.

"[The government] says it's too many and will affect the stability of the country," he says. "So they don't do anything."

Building A System To Track Workers

Sirichai-Ekawat says the National Fisheries Association of Thailand is trying to establish recruitment centers to register and track workers willing to work Thai boats.

If it works, legalizing workers could undercut the black market in men. But it's too soon to tell if that plan will work. In the meantime, men like Prum continue to be sold onto the seas against their will.

This river of men weighs heavily on Prum's mind as he winds through Malai.

"I wanted to come help so Cambodians wouldn't go work in a foreign country," he says. "And now you see everything has changed completely — the road, the house — everything."

Prum didn't find his trafficker. He slumps against the car door.

If he had found him, what would he have done?

"I was angry before," says Prum, "because he did a bad thing. But now I don't feel any anger or revenge at all. I wanted to find him and tell him not to do this job anymore because it does harm. "

With that, the car turns around and drives past the empty money-changing stalls and the restaurants with cots for border-crossers set up in back. Prum keeps his gaze straight ahead as he leaves Malai. He doesn't say a word.

Copyright 2012 National Public Radio. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

Transcript

RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:

A story now about the dark side of Thailand's fishing trade. Thailand is the world's third largest exporter of fish, and a major supplier to the United States. Its fleet of boats and trawlers is massive, but it's also chronically short of workers, and human traffickers are sending unwilling migrants to work on Thai boats. Reporter Becky Palstrom has this story of how one Cambodian man was lured onto a fishing boat and forced to stay for three years.

PALSTROM: Prum is 33 years old. He's been a monk, a soldier, a rice farmer, a husband, and for three years a slave on a Thai fishing boat.

PRUM: (Through translator) I didn't get paid. I remained in the middle of the sea. I worked day and night.

PALSTROM: Prum and nine other men lived and worked on a Thai fishing boat the length of an 18-wheeler. Prum's captain and the crewmaster were Thai and armed. The rest spoke three other languages and were working as slaves.

PRUM: (Through translator) While we were working on the boat, there were verbal disputes between us. Some people worked harder, some people worked less. Danger always happens at night.

PALSTROM: Thailand's long-haul fishing fleet has tens of thousands of men on the high seas. Around 60,000 of these men, or 40 percent, are not Thai - they're immigrants, many from Burma and Cambodia. Not all the Cambodians and Burmese men are forced onto the boats, but those that are might stay at sea for months or years because their boats are re-supplied out at sea. Prum didn't see land for three years.

MANFRED HORNUNG: So just to mention the psychological pressure, always being crammed together over years, you know, not being able to leave this confined space - that creates also a lot of aggression.

PALSTROM: Manfred Hornung spent years rescuing Cambodian slaves with a group called LICADHO.

HORNUNG: If you want to keep this kind of slave colony under control, you have to use means, either being drugs or violence, in order to keep people down.

PALSTROM: Guns deter mutiny and drugs, mainly amphetamines, keep the men working through the night. When Prum left his village in Cambodia, he never thought he'd end up in these conditions.

PRUM: (Through translator) At that time my wife was pregnant and was expecting to deliver a baby within two months. We didn't have the money for the medical bill.

PALSTROM: He planned to be gone two months, back in time for the birth. But he was intercepted by a taxi driver who doubled as a broker. Brokers often recruit for the human traffickers who then smuggle men into Thailand. The driver offered Prum a job.

PRUM: (Through translator) I asked what kind of job, and he said drying fish.

PALSTROM: Thai boats have such a bad reputation that most brokers promise jobs in other sectors like fish processing, construction or factory work.

PRUM: (Through translator) I said I wouldn't go. I was afraid that I would be cheated and that I wouldn't come back home.

PALSTROM: But after some time, when he didn't find work, he changed his mind. He agreed to go with the driver to a town called Malai.

Malai is a Cambodian border town. Here in the market, Thai noodles, soy sauce and clothes lie side by side with deep fried water snake. Tep Khannal is the district chief of Malai. He says human traffickers line the pockets of the money-lenders, the taxi drivers, even the Cambodian military. He says he can't stop it because too many people are on the traffickers' payroll.

TEP KHANNAL: (Through translator) I want to put an end to this but I cannot handle this problem alone.

PALSTROM: Once Prum and the others crossed the river into Thailand, the trafficker made them get into the back of a truck. Like logs of wood, they had to lie side-by-side and even on top of each other to fit. Prum still believed he was heading for a good paying job on land, drying fish. But his truck pulled into a Thai port and the men were offloaded into a room.

PRUM: (Through translator) On the interior wall of that building, where I was confined, there were boat paintings and descriptions like: In the middle of the sea, I miss my wife, children and parents.

PALSTROM: The house was locked from the outside.

PRUM: (Through translator) I watched through a hole in the wall, I saw the sea and boats. I realized I was trafficked and sold to work on a fishing boat.

PALSTROM: Once on the boat, men are supposed to be protected by the Marine Police. Surapol Thuantong is a former Marine Police commander. He says police and Marine police are part of the problem.

SURAPOL THUANTONG: Every part of the Thai officers benefits from this. From the province, police, labor officers - they all get bribes from illegal migrants and the related businesses.

PALSTROM: In fact, despite the scale of the problem, Thai police only investigated 11 cases of labor trafficking in 2010. Thuantong says there are rules to protect the men, but the Thai government is reluctant to enforce them.

THUANTONG: (Through translator) Well, we stand in a position that we can't follow the rules. Everyone around us is against the rules. We know it's against the law, but we can't fix it, because if we fix it, then this business would be crippled.

PALSTROM: Somchai Wongthong is the under-secretary for Thailand's Department of Labor, the division charged with enforcing Thai labor laws. He says they can't enforce labor laws at sea, so they ask the Navy to do the checks.

SOMCHAI WONGTHONG: (Through translator) The Thai Navy's job is to protect Thai waters. So we should trust that they will do their job and fulfill their duty.

PALSTROM: Trust but no oversight.

WONGTHONG: (Through translator) Hopefully one day in the future, if there are more budget allocations, we can work on that, but now there are certain constraints.

LUIS DEBACA: We've seen a few cases investigated.

PALSTROM: Ambassador Luis deBaca directs the State Department's Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons.

DEBACA: To date we're not seeing an awful lot of results yet from the new focus on the abuse that's happening out on the boats.

DEBACA: At the end of the day, though, without a coordinated effort by governments in the region, the enslavement of the foreign migrants in the east Asian waters is going to continue to contribute to an impending food security crisis. And that's something that we're very concerned about.

PALSTROM: This impunity concerns the State Department for more than just humanitarian reasons. Captains that violate labor laws are also likely to violate the laws that limit over-fishing. With fisheries already on the decline, this poses real problems. The issue of slavery on Thai boats very quickly becomes a food security problem for the U.S. and the world. For NPR News, this is Becky Palstrom in Songkhla, Thailand.

MONTAGNE: That story was co-reported by Shannon Service. Tomorrow, the extent of corruption in Thailand's fishing industry and what that means for U.S. companies buying fish from abusive boats.

UNIDENTIFIED MAN #1: So if I wanted to smuggle anything, if I wanted to smuggle weapons, if I wanted to smuggle drugs, if I wanted to do all these various different things, put it on a fishing boat, because nobody checks. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright National Public Radio.